Thursday, November 26, 2015

ethdev | To research, design and build software that, as best as possible,
facilitates, in a secure, decentralised and fair manner, the
communication and automatically-enforced agreement between parties.

The facilitation will necessitate the building of tools to aid users
and developers alike to utilise the back-end systems and make them as
effective as possible in their facilities. It is anticipated that these
tools will include the development of consumer-grade end-user
components (the so-called Ethereum Browser) together with IDE-like
components and associated tools. It will also mean the provision of
certain high-level (on-the-system) functions, modules, examples,
templates, standards and live services without which development and
interoperation would suffer.

Security will likely entail use of strong cryptographic technologies,
but could also use various other technologies including, but not
limited to verifiable computation, computational steganography,
complex-systems modelling and formal proof systems.

Fairness must be absolutely guaranteed throughout. We agree that this
is pure technology and must make no affordances to the beliefs of any
single actor against any other. The system must never even have the
possibility of disadvantaging a single user or organisation over any
other. We accept that full decentralisation is pivotal in accomplishing
this.

Forward-enforceable agreement between arbitrary sets of parties is a
core goal, however to achieve this goal, parties must be able to
determine the existence and volition of the other. Communication
methods must be provided, on the same technological basis, to
facilitate this.

It is anticipated that the use of consensus-based blockchain technology
using a Turing-complete VM within its transaction resolver and an
arbitrarily large state space, such as that first proposed by Buterin
(2013) and an evolution of which was formalised by Wood (2014) will be
pivotal in the initial delivery.

It is also anticipated that additional research will need to be
conducted, both internally and externally in order to deliver solutions
of increasing concordance with these broad goals.